Okay, so my title for this topic is a little ostentatious. Sorry. My questions for the Narrativist experts out there multitudinous but they all revolve around having multiple premises in a game. I guess I should start with the obvious question.

Can a game run effectively with multiple premises? I guess I'm talking more about overt premise here rather than ones that sneak into play. Sorcerer, from what I've read, really revolves around the premise, "What price would you pay for power?" While that might be the premise being addressed by the group as a whole can individual players want to address clearly stated premises without confusing the game? What if one player wants to address, "Can evil really find love?" and another is interested in "Is control really an illusion?" (Please, don't judge my example premises too harshly. I'm thinking of them off the cuff.) That would be 3 premises between 2 players. Having never played a premise-heavy game, would that get confusing or would it dilute the power of the game until no premise really gets addressed?

How can mechanics support multiple premises? Examples would be interesting. Once again, my understanding is that Sorcerer's mechanics really push it's stated premise. Does it have the capability to push the player-defined premises that arise? How? With rewards systems or conflict resilution systems or both?

Gah! I've got too many questions! Here I was. A happy little Illusionist / Participationist GM, minding my own business and now look what you Forgerites have done to me. :-)

While I'm FAR from a narrativist expert, my opinon is that its possible to address multiple overt premises but would be an added strain in game design. Also , it would probably be natural to end up combining them into an uber premise during play, if possible.

I think the situation you are describing is more one of players injecting and addressing their own mini-premises during play. I think this is not only possible but is the desired mode for nar play. For example, in Sorcerer the premise is: "How much of X are you willing to give to get Y" X is pre-loaded with the word "humanity" but otherwise a variable. TROS has a premise: " is X worth killing/dying for" that more so evolves out of the structure than is explicitly stated. For these premises to be addressed they have to be broken down into mini-premises: Is love worth...Is power worth...Is forgetfullness worth....

As each character plugs into the theme they present their own variations that, in essence, define the main theme through action during play. I like to think of each character's mini-premise as different acts or scenes in a movie or play. Individually they are separate but linked together they form an over arching plot which defines the movie or play itself.

Hi there,

Brendan's right. The way I see it ...

Sorcerer, from what I've read, really revolves around the premise, "What price would you pay for power?" While that might be the premise being addressed by the group as a whole can individual players want to address clearly stated premises without confusing the game?

What if one player wants to address, "Can evil really find love?" and another is interested in "Is control really an illusion?"

Ron already answered, but I though to add something about game design and GMing multiple premises.

One example of such play would be a high focus on Situation designed to be addressed. Take a game situated in ancient Rome, for example with the characters as slaves and slaveowners; the GM does his best to heighten the tension. There is no single premise, because it's likely that different players will hook on to different perspectives and empahises of the Situation. They will each formulate a premise, like "Freedom or Death" or "Individual or State" or whatever else the slave scenario suggests.

The above scenario can be characterised as mainly narrativist in bend because most of us have strong convinctions about personal freedom and civilization ("Is slavery right, and in what conditions?" would be the general premise here). The point of play, if you remove any obvious win conditions, can only really be about addressing premise growing from the social gap between slaves and masters. Note that although the game would be quite narrativist (assuming proper indifference towards deep exploration), the actual premise would be constructed by the player. Likewise it wouldn't be the premise itself supported by the scenario, but instead premise play in general.

In a more general vein, I find that I don't know of any game that focuses so strongly as to really support a single premise. The strength of literary art (of which narrativist roleplaying is part) is in being concrete as compared to philosophy, and this means largely having room for interpretation. You can use larger, more general words with a premise (like "What you'd give for power"), but in implementation it will be the rare character that will exactly duplicate the "premise" so stated. Rather each character and player will take a limited perspective, based on his experience, about the matter. This is as it should be, as humans have different opinions and thus understand things differently.

A further example about how premise is defined from some general starting point: if I personally were to answer the question of "What you'd give for power", it would entirely depend on the kind and amount of power (or the situation, in other words). If it were a question of, say, selling my mother for power, I'd place the price somewhere along the lines of... well, you really don't need to know that. Anyway, the question has thus been transformed to the very specific form of "How much for your mother?" This is still the same question, but in a much more defined form.

I suggest that you think of premise as stated in general for a given game as the ur-premise, the thing that bounds the game's outer reaches. The actual premise for play will then be realised (consiciously or not) in how the players respond to the wibe. One will see a problem in determining the rights of a human being to sell himself as a slave, while another will agonize over how slavery will affect the culture, the people owning the slaves. Different premises, same ur-premise.

... Now that I actually read what Ron wrote, it's the exact same thing I just said. Oh, well. We should probably consider using different words for premise-in-play and premise-in-theory, though; a given game can only have a premise in theory, the ur-premise, while the only premise that can be played is the play-premise. Might be that the first will include the second (it has to, or the game won't support play), but they are not the same. When talk about a given game's premise grows more common, the distinction will be ever more important.

Ron Edwards wrote:

What if one player wants to address, "Can evil really find love?" and another is interested in "Is control really an illusion?"

See, all this is way too abstract and conjures up a picture of people sitting around with furrowed brows, in isolation, musing about abstract this-and-that. Think instead of Sorcerer Kickers - they are anything but abstract and theoretical. They are changes, crises, emergencies, action. All you really need is mutual interest, and a shared reward system (Humanity) and the unity will arrive in whatever form is best, as determined by the shared authorship (Narrativist protagonism) at the table.

If I may....

I think that Ron is trying to note that often Premise is not explicitly enunciated at the beginning of play. However, during play, the Premise question can become apparent.

Case in point: my first Unknown Armies campaign did not start with any formal sitting down and figuring out what our game was going to be about. All I did was start with a couple of normal people who ended up being the protectors of an infant (the classic "please take my baby" situation) from dark forces that swirled around them.

However, as the game progressed, the Premise became obvious. "What are you willing to sacrifice for your family?" The group of PCs became, in essence, a family. In retrospect, it seems so obvious. One of the characters was an orphan in foster care. Another one was a maternity nurse. The last one was an "orphaned" clockwork (her master had died) who was an innocent. And then there was Moe, the infant. And it was these familial ties that drove everything.

However, the addressing of Premise arose not from a statement of Premise but from the Kickers. Well, to be fair, we didn't use Kickers a la Sorcerer. However, the Premise that we chose to address rose out of a situation that was of interest to all of us. The Premise-addressing came through play. And we really only discovered the Premise as we were playing the game. However, the potential for Premise-addressing was there, because we included material that was meaningful to us as players.

You also need to understand that this comes out of a broader understanding of what stories are, in the first place. If you poke at them, all stories have these underlying questions that they are answering. Just think about Lethal Weapon, one of the classic action movies. In that movie, the Premise is all about family. However, each character addresses it differently. For Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson's character) the focus is on a man gaining a new family and, specifically, choosing family over death. For Sergeant Murtaugh (Danny Glover's character) the focus is on the choice between being a father and being a policeman. Is it right for me to go outside the law to protect my family? See what I mean? Same broad Premise, but different aspects of addressing it.

I chose Lethal Weapon specifically because it is not high art or some acknowledged work of cinematic beauty. This way, you can see how these issues show themselves even in lowbrow work.

Seth Ben-Ezra
Great Wolf

Well, as usual I go all stimulus-response, and drag out my definition of a premise, as seen in Ron's framing of an Egri premise as a question:

A premise is a question which can only be adequately framed in the general, but only adequately addressed in the particular.

Hi there,

Andrew (Gaerik), both M.J. and Pete have provided excellent answers. Let me see if I can provide a third point which, in combination with theirs, allows you to see the shape of what we're all saying.

When you read the phrase "Premise is the important moral (or at least Thematic) question central to the character or situation," and "Narrativist play is defined by Addressing Premise," put aside all images of players saying this to one another or even thinking about it in explicit terms.

It's something people do. You do it as an audience member, or you would never become engaged in a story. You do it as a creative person unless you have some specific alternative to hand, or unless you've been brainwashed out of it. It is literally the "beneath idiom, beneath language" structure of how we imagine events and construct fiction.

All those phrases that you're talking about, and that I provided a couple of above? They're observational descriptions of what people are doing. They are not in any way internal-state sensations which the people, or most anyway, could acknowledge when they happen.

Check out all those "best moments of role-playing" that are cropping up in that Birthday Present thread in the Actual Play forum. What you're seeing there is people who are realizing that they did play Narrativist for a brief moment, and that they really liked it, and are now wondering what the hell they thought they were doing all the rest of the time. My point is that they didn't have to say, pompously, "I am now addressing the issue of Might Makes Right." It's something most people want to do, so the part of the mind which busily justifies and verbalizes things ("talks," "thinks") is not involved.

Best,
Ron

Ah! *Light going on in the attic* I get it!

If Situation/Character is frontloaded with all the stuff that makes good stories (conflict, drama, etc etc) then Premise will be addressed in the course of play as an natural result of the story. Multiple Premises can easily be addressed (almost a must actually) because each character is bringing something different to the Situation. Facilitating the addressing of Premise by the GM is simply adding elements to the game that stress the Situation for the Characters. Or as Emeril would put it "BAM!! Kickin it up a notch!"

Did I just have a "Duh!" moment?

I think if people remember that Premise does not have to be clearly articulated, nor even overtly understood at any verbal level, then a lot of hypothetical fear of "oh no, multiple Premises" evaporates.

Hello,

Andrew, that's a "duh" moment ... but the good kind. More of a high-five than a "duh."

Consider the role of protagonist decisions in a story, and the unique quality of role-playing as a medium in which we are all authors and audience at once, and you're there.

Best,
Ron

Ron Edwards wrote: Andrew (Gaerik), both M.J. and Pete have provided excellent answers.